A jukebox musical, whatever its dramatic blueprint, is first and foremost a delivery vehicle for nostalgia. This is a popular thing and to a great extent a good one. It is no easy trick, though. Almost every song tells some sort of story. The stories in most songs, even the simplest ones, imply surprisingly extensive contexts, and taken together, these contexts tangle rapidly. There exist only a few possible fundamental ways to minimize those tangles.
The legend has it that one of the Ptolemies ordained that the police would seize every book brought by each traveler into Alexandria, have it swiftly copied by scribes standing by at the library, and then return it to its owner, much as the Ptolemies’ successors in the field of American law, the West folks in Minnesota, engorge and process each new addition to the agreed legal canon. But centralizing all that information also magnified its exposure. We know the titles of many books that did not make it down through time to us because they were “preserved” in just such a fashion at Alexandria.